I gave up Oreos around fifteen years ago when my sweet tooth deserted me and I no longer craved cookies, ice cream, candy or anything of the sort. But I still like Ritz crackers with peanut butter on them.
In all my years though, I never thought to take a Ritz cracker covered in peanut butter and press it with one Oreo cookie covered with its creme filling. That never occurred to me and there may be a simple reason.
Back in the early seventies, I was trying to launch my career as a professional writer (including working with Jack Kirby) and also attend classes at U.C.L.A. I am in no way against higher education for some — perhaps, most — but not all. I didn't learn a damned thing at college, especially because they kept insisting I take courses that in no way related to my chosen career.
For that and other reasons I must have explained here somewhere, I decided to quit U.C.L.A., a decision that didn't sit entirely well with my father. He understood the logic. You theoretically go to college to get a better job and college was stopping me from getting a better job. But he still felt a little uncomfortable about it so as a compromise, I agreed to continue my education by taking some courses at Santa Monica College where I also didn't learn anything of value to me and eventually left.
I liked S.M.C. more than I'd liked U.C.L.A., partly because I spent a lot less time in its classrooms. I also liked that S.M.C. seemed less serious and friendlier…and being only a mile and a half from the ocean, it had a feeling of going not to school but to the beach. Some students of both genders dressed accordingly and it felt very casual. There was also this vending machine there that fascinated me.
They had the usual bank of machines that sold coffee and soft drinks and candy…but there was this one machine that sold sandwiches. I'm going to need to insert two images here so I can explain how this machine worked…
On the right there, you see a little packet of Buddig Honey Roasted Turkey. I'm sure you've seen these or something similar in your local supermarkets. Each packet contains just enough lunch meat to make one thin sandwich. Packets like this one were the basis for this machine. We didn't have the Buddig brand then. It was some other company but the chopped, reconstituted, full-of-additives products were identical.
So now look at the vending machine at left. You've seen these all over. They dispense chips and candy and cookies and other snacks, each labelled with its own price. You put in the proper amount of change, push one or more buttons to tell the machine which item you're buying and it dispenses one of it to you, dropping it into a bin at the bottom.
Well, the machine at S.M.C. was like this but it was refrigerated…and on the first row, you could select a single-serving packet of beef, a single-serving packet of chicken, a single-serving packet of turkey, a single-serving packet of something they claimed was corned beef (it wasn't) or a single-serving packet of ham.
The packets on the next row down each contained two slices of bread. You could select white, white, wheat, rye or sourdough. I remember there were always two slots for white bread.
Then the next row down had add-ons: A packet with one or two slices of American cheese, one of Swiss, one of Cheddar, and then a packet with sliced tomato and one of lettuce leaves.
The next row was condiments: Little packets of ketchup, mustard, barbecue sauce, mayo, hot sauce, etc. And then the bottom row held single-serving bags of chips — potato chips, corn chips, pretzels, etc. Since the chips were the most breakable, they must have put them on the bottom row to minimize how far they'd fall to drop into the bin.
So all you had to do was purchase the components and assemble your sandwich. I don't recall the exact prices but it went something like this: You'd buy a packet of ham (25¢), a packet with two slices of rye bread (15¢), a packet with cheddar cheese (15¢), a packet of mustard (5¢) and a bag of Ruffles potato chips (20¢). In no time at all, you'd have a ham and cheese on rye with mustard and chips for eighty cents. Or whatever your sandwich of choice was that day.
I should add: If I'm off on the prices, I'll bet I'm over. It felt more like sixty cents. Some days if I was hungry, I might splurge, put in another quarter and double-up on the meat in my sandwich.
I was just fascinated with this invention. I'd buy a Pepsi from another machine and that's how I'd lunch every day I was at S.M.C., all the time thinking, "Wow. Whoever invented this is going to make a fortune. They'll have these everywhere!" And then I never saw another one again…anywhere. In fact, I think the one at S.M.C. disappeared from that campus before I did.
As you may know, I spent a lot of time at hospitals when my mother was ill and later when my lovely friend Carolyn was failing. It was a not uncommon situation for me to be there in the middle of the night, waiting for hours, needing something to eat. I learned where to find a bank of vending machines in every hospital to which either was ever admitted. I could not, however, find any real protein in any of them — just crackers and chips and sometimes pre-made sandwiches which had been there since the discovery of Penicillin.
One time in the Emergency Room at U.C.L.A. Medical Center, I found a machine that dispensed little cups of soup which one could purchase, then heat in a microwave oven nearby. I bought some Campbell's Chicken Noodle, peeled the lid off, put it in the microwave…and then noticed the sign that said the microwave was outta-order. Once more, U.C.L.A. had failed me. So often, in the wee small hours of the morning, I longed for that machine they had back at S.M.C. and wondered why that idea never caught on.
This is not the usual kind of Randy Rainbow video. He made a special one for a song from his new CD…
My little mental "to do" list has so many items on it that I found myself wide awake in bed this morning at 5:30 AM, running over and over it in my mind, trying to decide what to tackle in what order. "Getting enough sleep" seemed to be way down in my priorities.
I finally remembered a piece of advice I've given others: In the time you spend worrying about the length of such a list, you can probably get a few things done and cross them off. So I got up and I've been sitting here since about 6, doing them in any order. Most of them are trivial and would be of no interest to you (or in some cases, to me) but they have to be done. And once I get the list down to four or five tasks, maybe I can figure out the best sequence in which to address them.
A real low priority is to watch the two-part George Carlin documentary which resides safely on my TiVo…and there it shall stay until I have the time to give it the attention I expect it deserves. My life changed somewhat for the better when I got my first Video Cassette Recorder in the mid-seventies. Suddenly, I didn't have to be in front of the TV at a specific time to watch what I wanted to watch…and if the phone rang during that show, I didn't have to pick between taking the call and not missing part of a show I felt I had to see. And when I got my first TiVo, my control of what and when I watched TV became total.
I had a friend back then who loved to see current movies and what he enjoyed even more than seeing them was talking about them. He was always rushing to see what had just opened and always leading everyone around him into discussions of the films. We had a number of exchanges that went roughly like this…
HIM: So…what did you think of it?
ME, genuinely clueless as usual: What did I think of what?
HIM, like it should have been obvious: The new Burt Reynolds movie.
ME: I think I haven't seen it yet.
HIM, truly astonished: How could you not have seen it? It opened Friday and here it is, Tuesday!
ME: I didn't see it. I had other things to do. I'll get around to seeing it when I can…maybe.
HIM: I don't understand this. You want to see it, don't you?
ME: Yeah. But correct me if I'm wrong. I think it'll be the exact same movie if I see it week after next.
It helped me a lot to realize that I could watch a TV show or see a movie when it fit into my life. There have been a lot of great (I'm told) TV series and mini-series lately that I've not made the time for because I know I can always watch them later. In this age of streaming and Blu-rays and channels that repeat and repeat, not much worth seeing is ever going to be unavailable.
So: To those of you who've written to ask me what I think of the George Carlin Doc…I think I haven't seen it yet.
But I'll tell you what I did watch: This nice hour of Jon Stewart and Judd Apatow talking, first about Carlin and then about the state of comedy in general. Their exchange about Garry Shandling and The Larry Sanders Show may be of special interest to some…
Newsweek is copying me by posting raves for Frank Ferrante. If they keep stealing my routine, I may have to retaliate by stealing theirs. Look forward to lots of articles here making inaccurate predictions about foreign wars.
MAD's maddest writer Dick DeBartolo turns out be not only a funny guy but a mensch as well. He responded promptly to my e-mail…
Mark, I am shocked, shocked do you hear me??!!! Shocked to hear the producers of To Tell The Truth were hoodwinked!
I have just turned in my resignation and will not work on any Goodson-Todman show from now on. (Actually, that won't be difficult since I left there 30 years ago. Actually, the company left me when Mark Goodson died in 1992.)
To tell the truth (not the show, but the statement) I never heard of any repercussions due to a real contestant being an impostor when I worked on the show.
My credit on the show was "Special Material" or maybe "Creative Consultant" or something like that. I wore 'ad-libs' for Garry Moore, although he was very funny on his own. Sometimes I pitched people as the main character for the show. I pitched William M. Gaines, the publisher of MAD, and they used him. (God, I hope that really was him on air! Looked a lot like him.)
Because the prize money involved was small, and audiences loved the panelists on Goodson-Todman shows, maybe no one cared if the real person was also an impostor. But to finally answer your question, I never heard any talk at the G-T offices of that happening while I was there.
Good to hear from you. I hope you're well and stay well. MADly, DickDe
Dick's credit on that To Tell the Truth was "Special Material" but his real function when he was with Goodson-Todman was to apply his considerable sense o' humor to all the company's shows, no matter what his credit was or wasn't. He pretty much saved The Match Game when the first version was heading for cancellation by devising funny questions that led to funny answers. Since then, every revival of Match Game — it feels like there have been thousands — has used the kind of questions that Dick invented.
To tie up this whole topic, here's the segment in which Bill Gaines, publisher of MAD, appeared on To Tell the Truth with two men pretending to be Bill Gaines. Impostor #2 got as many questions right as the real Bill Gaines but everyone on the panel voted for #3 — and as you'll see, that delighted the real guy. You'll also see Garry Moore mention Dick to Mr. Gaines and get the response you'd expect…
From the I-Shoulda-Known Department: I shoulda known when I posted that episode of To Tell the Truth with Mayo Kaan, I would hear from people who knew more about him than I did. And I also shoulda known it might be my friend Steven Thompson. (Actually, I should probably say "one of my friends named Steven Thompson" because I know several. Steve Thompson, the expert on Walt Kelly who helps out with the Pogo reprint books we're doing is a different Steve Thompson and I know others.)
Anyway, the Steven Thompson I'm writing about at the moment did some digging a while ago and seems to have unearthed the truth about the man with the dubious story of having been the first model for Superman. You can read his full report here but here's the summary…
He was a bodybuilder and former artist's model, a lifeguard, and a one-time Vaudevillian, who made a homemade Superman suit in order to promote war bond sales to young people in and around his home town in Massachusetts for a while in 1942 before joining the Navy. Then about 20 years on, a reporter — accidentally or on purpose — referred to him as the original Superman and the story built from there.
People with bogus stories pop up in the news every day, especially in the Internet Era when there are so many sites desperate for content and clickbait. But it is interesting that Mayo Kaan got as far as he did with his claims at a time when the creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were alive and denying his story…and when the owners of Superman, DC Comics, were also saying he was a fraud.
But it is far from the only time To Tell the Truth got hoaxed. On an earlier version of the show — on the episode for November 26, 1957 — they had on a man named Jack Bothwell who claimed to have been a kid actor in the Our Gang comedies. He was not.
Here is that episode. Mr. Bothwell was in the second of three games that evening and I've configured this video so it should start playing just before that second game…
As I wrote on this very blog way back in 2002…
A few nights ago, Game Show Network ran a 1957 episode of To Tell the Truth in which one of the contestants was Jack Bothwell, a New Jersey restaurant host who said that, in his younger days, he'd played Freckles in the famous "Our Gang" comedies produced by Hal Roach. As per usual for the program, Bothwell and two impostors answered questions from the panel whose mission was to identify the real Jack Bothwell. In this case, their problem was a little more difficult because — as the show's producers obviously were unaware — all three men answering the questions were impostors. You see, there was no character named Freckles in the "Our Gang" films and Jack Bothwell never appeared in any of them.
And as you may have noticed, one of the "impostors" in the segment was Barney Martin, who later had a pretty good acting career.
I'm sure there are other examples of frauds on old game shows and I intend to get to the bottom of this. As several of you noted in e-mails to me, the Mayo Kaan episode of To Tell the Truth lists my buddy Dick DeBartolo in the credits. Dick worked on a lot of Goodson-Todman game shows when he wasn't being one of the best and most prolific writers for MAD magazine. I have dispatched an e-mail to Dick asking — no, demanding to know if he recalls any fallout from that episode.
And I'd also like to know if this kind of thing happened on any other game show Dick worked on and if so, what did they do about it? I'm guessing they did nothing, which would not have been the fault of someone on the staff like Dick. The producers wouldn't want to get into a lawsuit — even one they were sure they could win — over something that would be so quickly forgotten. I will let you know what Dick says…assuming he has the courage to respond.
Here we have an episode of the game show To Tell the Truth that originally ran on October 23, 1973. They play two games in this half-hour and in each, three people all claim to be the same person and are quizzed by the panel. The real person with that name is supposed to answer honestly (hence the name of the show) and the two impostors, if they don't know the real answers, are allowed to lie.
And what's interesting to me about this episode is that I don't think anyone was telling the truth.
The first game is built around a man named L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the term of President John F. Kennedy. Colonel Prouty's name is well known to folks who've studied the assassination of President Kennedy. Prouty was one of the major sources of conspiracy theories about that murder. In the Oliver Stone movie J.F.K., there was a mysterious informant character called "Mr. X" who was based to a great extent on Prouty.
Vince Bugliosi, in his book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, lists many of Prouty's wilder and debunked claims and describes him as…
…a right-wing zany who was a member of the Liberty Lobby, the…group that supported neo-Nazi David Duke's 1988 candidacy for president and embraces the notion that the Holocaust is really a Jewish hoax. He also served as a consultant to Lyndon LaRouche's right-wing National Democratic Policy Committee at a conference of which he provided a presentation comparing the U.S. Government's prosecution of LaRouche (for conspiracy and mail fraud) to the prosecution of Socrates.
So that's the first guest supposedly telling the truth. Nineteen minutes into the show, we come to the second subject…Mayo Kaan. Mr. Kaan was a one-time body builder who popped up in the early seventies claiming that he was the model for Superman. And he did have a photo of himself from earlier decades posing in a makeshift Superman costume.
But I personally heard both Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster say they'd never heard of him and had never been where Kaan claimed they discovered and hired him. This appearance on To Tell the Truth was part of Mr. Kaan's personal publicity campaign. He died in 2002 but many years before, he seems to have stopped promoting himself as The First Superman because so many reporters were poking holes in his claims.
In this segment, he claims he went to Hollywood and starred in one of the first Superman movies for Warner Brothers. If you know anything about the Man of Steel, you know that Warner Brothers didn't make a Superman movie until 1978 and it starred Christopher Reeve. The first screen appearance of Superman played by a real person, as opposed to a cartoon, was a serial made in 1948 by Columbia Pictures where he was played by Kirk Alyn. Some of the other claims Mr. Kaan made here and elsewhere didn't seem to match reality either.
Fans and collectors have offered various theories on what part of Kaan's story might be true. That photo of him in the homemade Superman suit — which is shown after they reveal which of the three men is the real Mayo Kaan — is just about all the evidence he had. It could have been as simple as him dressing up that way for publicity or maybe to submit himself to DC Comics to play Superman. It has also been theorized that he was hired to play Superman for some personal appearances, as were others. Me, I think it's enough that Siegel and Shuster (who are never mentioned in this segment) said they never heard of him.
Also in the show, you'll hear panelist Gene Rayburn insist that in the Superman movie or TV show, the Daily Planet building was actually a shot of some building in Providence, RI. Also not true. I believe the building in the Kirk Alyn serial was one then located at Wilshire and La Brea here in Los Angeles. And in the George Reeves TV series, they used the Los Angeles City Hall.
So here's the factually-challenged episode of To Tell the Truth. Let me know if you hear anyone get anything right…
I have had naught but praise for the people who run the Comic-Con International in San Diego. The more I attend that con…the more panels I host and the more I get involved with the inner working of the organization…the more impressed I am. It's clearly one of those endeavors which people do so well that it appears easy when it is anything but.
He has since retired from active involvement but for a long time, my pal Gary Sassaman was one those folks doing the impossible each year. He was at various times, Director of Programming, Director of Print and Publications and Director of Print and Digital Media but he did way more than those titles suggest. And as Director of Programming, Gary got me more deeply involved in hosting panels and he also provided the germ cell of the idea that grew into the annual Quick Draw! game.
Two things you should know about Gary. He's been blogging about his convention-going experiences and about his favorite comics over at his blog. Click on that link and go read anything that catches your eye. You will go back for more.
Second thing: He's the guest this Tuesday on the podcast of the San Diego-Comic Con Unofficial Blog. I did it a few weeks ago. He's up this Tuesday and if you're interested in the inner workings of that convention, I'm sure you'll enjoy the show. It starts at 6:30 PM Pacific Time. Go to the SDCC Unofficial Blog to watch it live or watch it later.
And while I have your attention…
Earlier today via e-mail, Gary and I were trying to figure out which conventions had the first ever Quick Draw! and the first Cartoon Voices panel. You'd think I'd know such a thing but there are a lot of things I should know and don't. Anyway, he came across material that showed that the first Quick Draw! was done at WonderCon in 2002.
I told him I thought the first Cartoon Voices panel was at Comic-Con in 2000. Gary had a copy of the program guide for that year and he looked it up. It said the Cartoon Voices panel was in Room 8 and it featured Gregg Berger, Laura Summer, Tom Kenny, Lucille Bliss, Bill Farmer and "a few surprises." Well, that was not the first Cartoon Voices panel. It was the second or third, I believe.
Does anyone reading this have access to a program guide for 1999 or 1998? We need the program guide that lists the schedule, not the souvenir book full of articles and artwork. If so, could you look for the Cartoon Voices panel hosted by me? And if you find it, write me and tell me what you find? Thanks.
Here's the second installment of Anna "Brizzy" Brisbin's informative series on the history of voiceover. If you missed the first chapter, you can view it here before you watch this one…
You will note in this one, Anna has a little problem with an interview in which Mel Blanc said something that doesn't pass serious fact-checking. One must always remember that people don't always remember. Even the most honest of us can get confused or misspeak. In Mel's case, I had enough contact with the man to formulate a theory why some of his stories don't seem to be utterly accurate.
Unlike other cartoon voice actors, Mel was a star. The others rarely (if ever) got billing. The others did radio shows as he did but didn't get prominent roles and featured billing the way Mel usually did, plus his association with Jack Benny made him pretty famous. And Mel understood the value of self-promotion. A number of the best voice actors became voice actors because they didn't hunger to be on camera. Some even liked the relative anonymity.
So Mel appeared on a lot of talk shows. He was a busy voice actor but never too busy to give an interview. And of course, the interviewers would always ask the same questions over and over: "How did you get into doing voices?" "Where did Bugs Bunny's voice come from?" And so on.
If people keep asking you the same questions over and over, you tend to give them the same answers. And if you're on talk shows, especially in front of a live audience, your answers need to be (a) quick and (b) funny. If accuracy is a condition at all — and with some people, it isn't — it's a distant third. When I was starting out in my vocation of writing things for which people would pay me money, I did a fair amount of writing "panel," that being stories that would be told while sitting in the guest chair with Johnny or Merv or the hosts of Good Morning, Oxnard.
A publicist for whom I worked occasionally would call and say that a certain client was up for a guest slot on The Mike Douglas Show and was "in need of panel." So I'd work with the client to make some anecdote they had shorter and simpler and it of course had to have a great punch line. I'm not going to say we sometimes made up completely phony stories…
Well, yes I am. I can't lie to you people. We did. Guests on talk shows still do that and often employ others to help them do it.
So what I think happened with Mr. Blanc was that he developed answers to talk show questions that weren't exactly fibs but weren't exactly the truth, either. As I said, what is wanted in that situation is quick and funny. If you were a serious animation historian, you wanted something detailed and accurate but if you were a talk show host and you had Mel Blanc on your show, you wanted quick and funny.
And Mel did a lot of those shows, especially after his near-fatal auto accident in 1961. Once he'd recovered enough to make the rounds, everyone wanted him on their programs to tell his story, and he wanted to do as many of them as possible to show the world that he was back and able to work. And I think sometimes, he got a little lost between the "talk show" version of a story and the real one. That happens a lot with people who get asked the same questions over and over and over and over…
Anyway, we eagerly await Part III of Anna's valuable history lesson. Good stuff.
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series long ago, I have a mess of food allergies and food intolerances. In fact, the list of things I do not eat grows longer as I get older. Around 2008, my "sweet tooth" miraculously disappeared and I began to not like — and sometimes feel strange after I did eat — anything with a lot of sugar in it like cakes, candy, pies, pastries, ice cream and even some fruits. Lately, I am increasingly unhappy in both ways with foods that have what chefs call "a little heat" — hot sauce, red pepper flakes, cayenne, etc. If its name includes the word "Cajun," my stomach doesn't want to have anything to do with it.
You probably can eat most or all of these things. I can't. These days, we're somewhat more aware that some bodies don't handle gluten well and others can go into anaphylactic shock from peanuts. Most restaurants know that not everyone can eat everything, and also that some of those who can't eat everything have lawyers who can sue anyone.
So yes, it's better than it once was. But an astounding number of people I encounter still say things like: "What do you mean you can't eat asparagus? I eat asparagus all the time! Asparagus never hurt anyone." There was a time, like around when I was six, I might have said that to someone who said they couldn't eat peanuts.
Or "Oh, you can eat asparagus the way I prepare it! I put cheese on it. You'll never know it's asparagus!" (To these folks, I usually say, "First, let me make you some rat poison. You'll really like the way I prepare it! I put cheese on it. You'll never know it's rat poison!")
I learned I just plain couldn't eat certain things when I was around twelve. Not long after, I learned a very valuable lesson in a very frightening way. It took place in a very fancy and famous restaurant.
Fancy restaurants serve fancy food. Fancy food usually means many ingredients and the more ingredients they put into it, the less likely you are to get an accurate (or even any) answer to the question, "What's in this?" I could fill this blog for days with stories about how impossible it is to get that answered in some places. The wait staff doesn't know…or doesn't seem to be that concerned about accuracy.
The chef is too busy…or occasionally even resents the question. Once, dragged to a Thai restaurant by a date who insisted we go there that night, I asked the waitress, "Which dishes do not have coconut milk in them?" She didn't know so I made her go and ask the cook. The answer turned out to be, "Whichever ones he chooses to not use it in this evening." Well, that was helpful.
This is getting too long so I'm going to save the story of the fancy, famous restaurant for the next installment of this column…but I'll give you a hint. How many of you recognize this man?
It wasn't exactly like that but when I saw that movie years later in a theater, it reminded me of what happened that evening in that famous, fancy restaurant. Fortunately, it did not happen to me but I was an observer…a horrified, scared-to-death observer. I'll tell that story next time.
Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem favor us with another selection…
Busy this morning with an article that must be written but also with disputing a bogus charge to one of my credit cards. The preliminary charge came through this morning at 5:02 AM and I woke up, saw it and thought, "I've never done business with that company…nor would I."
I called the credit card company and they suggested calling the company. They also told me this wasn't the first time this company has charged my card that amount. I missed a couple of previous transactions long ago that they cannot now be disputed. I have to wait until this charge is "posted" in three days before opening a dispute of this charge.
So I called the company five times. I got voicemail the first four but someone answered on the fifth try. A lady there says they have no record of "Evanier" on their computer and she's passing me on to their Billing Department which won't be in tomorrow and will call me Monday. By then, the charge will be posted and I can call the credit card company again to start the inquiry from their side.
I can think of a dozen different ways to make this process more efficient and reduce fraud but I figure if I could think of 'em, they could think of 'em and there are probably many good reasons why they do it the way they do it.
Okay, back to that article…
Here is me on Alicyn's Wonderland…